The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2018

In 1575 George Gascoigne broke with tradition, by attempting to describe the English verse line neither as a Romance accumulation of syllables nor as a classically ordered disposition of longs and shorts but as a grid of prominent and non-prominent accents. I quote from the beginning of the relevant passage of ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction’: And in your verses remember to place every word in his natural emphasis or sound: that is to say, in such wise, and with such length or shortness, elevation or depression of syllables, as it is commonly pronounced or used. To express the same we have three manner of accents, gravis, levis, et circumflexa, the which I would English thus: the long accent, the short accent, and that which is indifferent. The grave accent is marked by this charact: /. The light accent is noted thus: \. And the circumflex or indifferent is thus signified: ∼. The grave accent is drawn out or elevate, and maketh that syllable long whereupon it is placed. The light accent is depressed or snatched up, and maketh that syllable short upon the which it lighteth. The…

ON 20 November 1842, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, newly returned from Europe, wrote to his Father: ‘On the passage home I wrote some poems on Slavery, which I shall publish shortly in a pamphlet. … There are only eight in all and I hope you will like them’.1 While the composition of the first seven of these poems was as Longfellow suggests—written on his return voyage from Europe—the eighth and most highly regarded2 poem, ‘The Warning’, has a more complicated origin hitherto unacknowledged by critics. In his 1938 Young Longfellow, Lawrance Thompson explains that ‘The Warning’ is a selection from a poem Longfellow wrote for the Phi Beta Kappa Society in the early 1830s.3 ‘Perhaps,’ Thompson writes, ‘his thin reputation led him to clip out several lyrics from his Phi Beta Kappa poem in the fall of 1834. Two, entitled “The Dead” and “The Soul,” were sent to The Knickerbocker. Another, entitled “Truth,” was sent to the Boston Notion. One good poem, subsequently taken from the same source, was not published until 1842.’4 In a note, Thompson explains that this ‘One good poem’ was ‘The…

It has long been recognized that there are two different levels of theological knowledge in Beowulf.1 While the narrator and his eighth-century Anglo-Saxon audience are aware of Christian eschatology and scriptural history, these are unknown to the fifth- and sixth-century pre-Christian Scandinavian characters in the poem.2 To be sure, certain characters, like Hrothgar and Beowulf, evince the natural theistic wisdom that is universally accessible to pagans,3 but revealed knowledge is beyond their understanding. At the beginning of the poem, for example, the poet affirms to the audience outside the story that Scyld Scefing went after his death ‘into the Lord’s keeping’ (on Frēan wǣre, l. 27b),4 but the Danes who have just laid him in the funeral boat are said to be ignorant of the destiny of his soul:

EVIDENCE for stylistic division of King John is four-fold. Briefly noted below is a study in 2006 of the non-random distribution of feminine endings.1 A further examination summarized below makes use of the distribution of seven function words that are favoured by Shakespeare. The pattern shown by these words shadows the distribution of feminine endings, to the extent of preferring Acts I and IV as Shakespeare’s. A third testing makes use of the R Stylo package available on the internet. Here many more words are used, words common to a selection of Shakespeare and Peele texts. They indicate a division of King John which resembles that already shown. In addition, so-called characters, not to be confused with dramatic roles, are used to show similar results. Finally, a fourth testing makes use of the vast data base of n-grams and collocations collected by Martin Mueller and systemized by Pervez Rizvi. The pattern shows an affinity between Acts II and V (non-Shakespeare) and the close source of King John, The Troublesome Reign of King John.

The extent of Margery Kempe’s illiteracy is less straightforward than her Book suggests.1 Although consistently depicted as ‘hir not lettryd’ (128/29), her engagement with literary culture in the text (such as hearing books read to her) is ambivalent about her ability to read when historically recontextualized. However, an ambiguous passage in the Book is conventionally cited as unquestioned proof of Margery’s illiteracy, perhaps because its biblical context has been unrecognized.2 In Chapter 85, Margery has a vision that dramatically foreshadows the judgement of souls in the Book of Revelation: Sche fel in a lityl slomeryng, & a-non aperyd verily to hir syght an awngel al clothyd in white as mech as it had ben a lityl childe beryng an howge boke be-forn hym. Þan seyd the creatur to þe childe, er ellys to þe awngel, ‘A’, sche seyd, ‘þis is þe Boke of Lyfe’. And sche saw in þe boke þe Trinite & al in gold. Þan seyd sche to þe childe, ‘Wher is my name?’ Þe childe answeryd & seyd, ‘Her is Þi name at þe Trinyte foot wretyn’, & þerwyth he was ago, sche wist not how. (206/30–207/5)

In two poems of the 1730s, in separate descriptions of closeted indigence and conspicuous wealth, Alexander Pope mentions floors made of plaster. Although a floor of this kind might now seem an irregular feature of the built environment, they had long been commonplace throughout vernacular buildings, and came to add colour and character to the grandest townhouses. Plaster floors were unusual in neither setting. This note attempts to correct a modern misinterpretation of one of the two passages, and thus to explain how Pope’s first readers understood the references in question. The scene in which the poet imagined the death of George Villiers (1628–87), the spendthrift second Duke of Buckingham, is a...

The opening lines of the Exeter Book’s Rhyming Poem (RP) reflect the generally enigmatic and imagistic approach of this unusual piece of Old English verse, which sustains end-rhyme alongside its alliterative metre throughout.1 In doing so, the text is unique in the surviving corpus of Old English poetry, although shorter rhyming passages can also be found in longer poems such as Cynewulf’s Elene (1236–50) and Christ II (591–6):2

Everyone knows some basic facts about the early fourteenth-century poet Robert Manning of Brunne. He is responsible for two large works derived from Anglo-Norman texts. He dates them both, Handling Sin (from William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchéz) in 1303, and the Chronicle of England (from Wace and Peter Langtoft) in 1338. Given that, in the first of these poems, Manning says he had been a Gilbertine canon of Sempringham for fifteen years, he thus is ascribed an active floruit of half a century—and will, like his immediate contemporary, Michel of Northgate, have been close to seventy when he concluded his oeuvre.1 This narrative has always seemed to me perplexing, if not peculiar. How does anyone who has cranked out nearly 13,000 lines of decent poetry just shut up for more than thirty years? And why start up again, after a three decades hiatus and at an advanced age? And then produce 24,000 lines more?

The two concluding poems of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Sonnet 153 and 154, have a Hellenistic pedigree. As James Hutton observed in 1941, they allude to a pair of epigrams written by the fifth century ad poet Marianus, which are to be found in the Greek Anthology.1 This note will show that the Marianus-allusions elucidated by Hutton may be considered a key to an intertextual network which includes an even older, Pre-Marianian source. This intertextual dialogue can be reconstructed from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154: Here under the plane-trees tired Love lay softly sleeping, having entrusted his torch to the nymphs. Said the Nymphs among themselves: ‘Why not do it at once? Would that together with this we could put out the fire in men’s hearts?’ But it was the torch that set fire to the water, and henceforth the Love-Nymphs pour forth here hot water for men to bathe in. (Anth. Graec. IX; 627) [Iamblichus and his disciples] decided to go to Gadara, a place which has warm baths in Syria, inferior only to those at Baiae in Italy, with which no other baths can be compared. … There were two hot…